Brothers In Arms
by Diamroyal
Summary: Snoggywoggy oneshot. Brothers in arms, across barriers, across worlds....Angst. Suicide. Titled after the song by Dire Straits.


: grins : Hee. /this, is an /evil/ song. It has been /making/ me have /horrible/ plot bunnies for/ever, but this ended up being entirely different than any of /those/. So I'm happy.

Warnings: Angst. Switching POVs. Tenses are a little iffy, too.

Thank you to Crazy, for pointing out weird spots. Thanks to Miyabi, for being there to read/despite/ the fact that she has all these /horrible/ papers due, and is scampering about the Japanese countryside...: looks cross :

Brothers in Arms

One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door.

These mist covered mountains  
Are a home now for me

I could smell the salt water, if I tried hard enough. The powers that be had hooked me up to an IV after I'd stopped eating. I hadn't resisted, so they didn't tie me down. Their mistake, but I wasn't going to let them know that yet.

Give them some time, if you will. When they start leaving other things loose in the room, I'll move, and I'll do it subtly. I've had hard lessons in many different ways of getting attention, and I think, after having lived my life for so long using one method, I'd use another.

I could smell the sea…but I wasn't within fifty thousand miles of the ocean.

But my home is the lowlands  
And always will be

Matching graves. Matching flowers. He and his wife, both empty coffins, one body lost to a suicidal explosion, the other to a requested one.

Both persons' remains scattered across space.

The other grave there had a body in it. But that was only because he'd never given us the opportunity to take down a request.

I guess there'd always be a debate over whether or not he was impulsive, or just the very opposite.

Some day you'll return  
To your valleys and your farms

To walk into the flaming arms of death is so much harder to do than to contemplate hitting a clean button. You have to prepare for it in a different way. My chosen death, I think, was going to kill the one I chose to die by. I almost didn't mind. He was dying, anyway.

To me, it is not a matter of slitting a wrist. That takes too much calm, and I can't make that decision in the heat of the moment, when all of my body is working on pumping me more full of endorphins, when it is simply a single second, or less, for me to decide. That was much easier.

I'd played it well. The more I practiced with him, the more used to it he got. For us, naked blade, the clash of steel on steel, as we fretted away the concerns we'd been wrought with, and lost ourselves in that chemical rush.

Then, all it took was a purposeful misstep, a moment when I knew that was it.

There's no true way to fix a slit throat, and the only willpower it took to get there was for me to drop to my knees instead of pulling my weapon up. A simple command of nerves, and by the time I felt any pain through the endorphins, I was dead.

And you'll no longer burn  
To be brothers in arms

There were tears in his eyes as he looked up at me, the only time I'd ever seen him cry. "I talked to God, once."

I snorted. "What did he say?"

A shudder wracked his body, and I didn't see the gun he'd cradled in the curve of his body. I only heard the pounding of the stock, and the hollow tinkling of the shards on the cement after they had gone through him. He looked up at me again, and this time, it wasn't a tearstained face, but a wildly heartbroken man, falling back on humor as he lay in my arms, blood and thicker things falling out of his back, into my lap, and through my fingers. His last words might have been to me, or they might have been in response to my question. They worked as both.

"I'm sorry."

Through these fields of destruction  
Baptisms of fire

There's no escaping the flashes in eyes as they look at me and see something else superimposed over my countenance. They see more symbol, and less human being. I think it's safe to say that I've learned my lesson well. There will be no more hounding, no more flushing with the heat of pursuit or capture. I have nothing left to give but for a few, dilapidated ideals that have no place in this world.

My enemies, all of them, in all of their different guises, haven't been able to state it as simply, as elegantly as someone who was a friend, a partner, and an enemy. And it all centered around doing what was right.

But my sense of self no longer lets me differentiate between good, evil, right, wrong. There were too many fine lines that I didn't have the patience to skirt around, or barge through. It took too much effort, and I was beginning to see that it always would, to live in this, as they wanted me to. Not worth the effort, not worth the time. So tired.

I've watched all your suffering  
As the battles raged higher

There was nothing to stop me from following him any of the nights before, but this night, I chose to.

Outside, I found him kneeling in the alley, staring down into the pavement as if all the secrets of the universe could be found with that as a point of concentration.

He looked up at me, and smiled, and gave a rough chuckle, his voice long gone, after having vomited and dry heaved for so many minutes, over and over and over again.

It was something he'd started doing months ago, throwing up after he got home from work. After that night, when I followed him out, I began to wait, and follow him later, whenever he left. Maybe I did it to be a comfort in the dark.

We all handled it differently.

And though they did hurt me so bad  
In the fear and alarm

The wind was cold. Always so cold. I could punish myself with the wind.

I just don't think it would be worth it anymore. I spend too much of my energy doing nothing but thinking. I dissect all the different things that might have led us to a different juncture in time, and am lost. The lack of sleep, too much time devoted to this fruitless pursuit has left me open for the wind.

There's no one left to offer me a haven, they've all been destroyed in the wind, the brush of the elements setting even their last, gargantuan feet down, refusing a place to the last beggar of a lost strand of people.

No forgiving, no forgetting. A line in the sand that disappears in the cold wind.

You did not desert me  
My brothers in arms

The nightmares were starting to wake him up. They'd shake him out of sleep, as they'd never done before, and they'd push him into the bathroom, where he'd stare into his reflection, willing whatever he saw there away. I recognized the look, because it was often the one I used to attempt the same thing, only with my waking world.

He willed away the things that never bothered him before, I was there doing the same thing with things that always had.

Mine involved guilt, just as his did. But mine was intangible, and I think his were more gory, more red.

Several times, he's woken in a cold sweat.

There's so many different worlds  
So many different suns

I'd come to the conclusion early on that there were membranous coverings over people. They saw what was meant for them to be seen, they heard what was meant for them to hear, and that was it.

They couldn't comprehend anything else. Their lack made me want to destroy that membrane, but I didn't have the tools. I never would.

Not my area for exploration. I wasn't the one to give them new things to try, I was the one that would wipe up after them. I only saw what was left over, in the end.

There were only a few of us who could understand that.

And we have just one world  
But we live in different ones

The seasons continued to roll away into the past, each of them pulling with it more warmth, more time. More of us. He looked at me, with the sun shining behind his back, and I saw it fracture in between where his hair was, and the shadows that encased his face.

"What do you think true peace is like?" He asked me.

I didn't know, I only knew what I had experienced. But I could think of a good answer. "Like sleep, maybe." The wood of the floorboards weren't reflecting any light. Just showing how very dusty the light was, each mote catching just a little bit more. "Or it might be like death." I met his eyes, what I could see against the brilliant light.

"I haven't done anything but hear of peace."

Now the sun's gone to heaven  
And the moon's riding high

My concentration was slipping. I could see the evidence of it in all of my actions, in the reflection of them in everything around me.

I was living so far into the past, but that was where I was preferring to be. I was just having trouble pulling myself out of the past.

Was I going to permit such a trespass over the world around me go unnoticed? No…that wasn't the question…it was more a level of need, anymore. What I needed in my concentration, in my attention to detail in the world around me anymore—and what could I do without.

Let me bid you farewell  
Every man has to die

I guess space was just another type of sea, with another type of sailor for it.

Walking along the edge of the ocean was just as it was when you were walking along the edge of a hull, only your suit keeping the lack of elements away. On the sand, it wasn't even sandals. You could let liquid death lap at your toes, and most would enjoy it, me being no exception. The feeling was too foreign to me, and in that, I was like any sailor in the vastness of space. There for the novelty.

They were so connected…so very much a part of each other, with an intertwining of needs hidden deep within each sailor, explorer, pilot.

If I lay in the water, I could let the waves, the currents, all of that control where I was going to go. I didn't need to put any thought into it, because I knew, one way or another, I'd end up somewhere.

But it's written in the starlight  
And every line on your palm

Perhaps if Treize were still alive, I might have recognized this feeling of ill will in me. But he was dead, me being the one who had killed him. I think he would have understood my sentiments.

After all…he was the one who came up with the idea for our generation, and what we embodied to him was, most assuredly…well, he was the only one who saw in us what we might have been, if our lives, and his, and everyone's on Earth and the colonies had made different choices, and lived different lives.

I think, had that been the case…we would have gotten along with him quite well. But the thought alone is still enough for me to be nauseous, having been his downfall. I'm not above feeling sorry for myself in this manner.

We're fools to make war  
On our brothers in arms

Brothers In Arms, Dire Straits


End file.
